Principal Engineer Software, External Discovery (Xpanse)

Company Description

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks® everything starts and ends with our mission:

Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.

Our vision is a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. We are a company built on the foundation of challenging and disrupting the way things are done, and we’re looking for innovators who are as committed to shaping the future of cybersecurity as we are.

Our Approach to Work

We lead with flexibility and choice in all of our people programs. We have disrupted the traditional view that all employees have the same needs and wants. We offer personalization and offer our employees the opportunity to choose what works best for them as often as possible - from your well-being support to your growth and development, and beyond!

At Palo Alto Networks, we believe in the power of collaboration and value in-person interactions. This is why our employees generally work from the office three days per week, leaving two days for choice and flexibility to work where you feel most effective. This setup fosters casual conversations, problem-solving, and trusted relationships. While details may evolve, our goal is to create an environment where innovation thrives, with office-based teams coming together three days a week to collaborate and thrive, together!

Job Description

Your Career

The Xpanse External Discovery team is expanding, and we’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our team. At Xpanse, we believe that making the internet a safer place for our customers matters. The Xpanse External discovery team is responsible for the website visibility capabilities in our product, enabling customers to gain a comprehensive understanding of their web inventory, identify any potential misconfigurations and detect web technology vulnerabilities. We do this by crawling the internet for websites, classifying them by technology and CVE and presenting customers with a comprehensive understanding of their web attack surface. 

As a Senior Engineer on the External Discovery team, you will design and build out new capabilities in the web visibility product, while enhancing and maintaining existing capabilities. The External Discovery team has several new customer-facing features in our roadmap and your work will be instrumental in bringing those features to life. 

Your Impact

• You will draw upon your experience to rapidly investigate and prototype new functionality built upon cutting-edge technology, then switch to implementation mode to deliver products built upon your findings
• You will be working closely with customer success teams to understand what’s important to our customers - with product management teams to align efforts across the product and other engineers on your team to create designs to address these challenge areas and integrate new capabilities in the product
• You will represent the team in architecture roadmap planning sessions, interfacing regularly with other senior engineers, architects, and product managers
• You will be a technical implementer within the team, developing web visibility capabilities end-to-end and maintaining them in production
• You will collaborate with the rest of your team on architectural direction, managing technical debt, and continuously evolving the team's agile development process

What You’ll Do

• Design, implement and maintain web visibility features in the Expander product
• Work with peer development teams to design, implement and maintain cross-platform components of the Expander product
• Analyze existing services, identify barriers to scaling - recommend changes - implement
• Take part in architecture strategy sessions - build a point of view with your team, advocate for it
• Collaborate with teams to solve problems, reduce technical debt, and evolve development practices - Drive technical best practices and evangelize new technologies within the engineering organisation 
• Mentor other engineers and ensure that your team delivers high-quality output
• Take ownership of projects, drive them to completion, and support them in production

Qualifications

Your Experience

• 4+ years of experience as a professional software engineer writing back end software
• Have a passion for writing software that boosts the productivity of other software development teams - Excited to dig in, prototype, build, test, and see projects through to production - results driven, with strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Experienced and opinionated about API design and distributed backend systems - Able to switch between research, design, prototype, and implementation
• Are proficient in Java